Hundreds of men have been asked to give their DNA to help solve the murder of a little girl in Germany 23 years ago.
Claudia Ruf was 11 when she was abducted while walking a neighbour’s dog in the German town of Grevenbroich, about 13 miles from Dusseldorf, in May 1996.
Her family became worried when the dog returned home but she did not.
Claudia’s body was found two days later, more than 40 miles away. She had been raped and strangled to death before her body was doused with petrol and burned.
Posters were placed on buses and trains, police gave out pamphlets, and a reward was offered to find Claudia’s killer but with no success.
In a new attempt to track the suspect down, German police have asked 800 men who were between the ages of 14 and 70 at the time of Claudia’s death to give a saliva sample.
Officers say traces of DNA were found on Claudia’s body and they hope the tests will find her murderer.
The 800 men are not suspects but police hope one of them might be related to the killer, perhaps without knowing it.
Police in the US have had success with this strategy, with dozens of men being arrested in recent years for unsolved crimes thanks to genetic genealogy.
Investigators are able to enter crime scene DNA into a public database linked to websites used by people to research their family trees.
The information can reveal a relative and lead police to the suspect through researching birth and death certificates, local newspapers and social media.
A number of meetings have been held with residents of the German village about the case and police said around 480 volunteers showed up for the first session on Saturday.
There are three more sessions to come, the last one on 1 December.
Police have said all DNA that does not match will be deleted.
A similar attempt was made to find Claudia’s killer in 2010, when 350 men were called up but police say they have found new clues since then.
This month, Claudia’s father recorded a video which was published by police where he pleaded for help in “solving the sad fate of my daughter”.
He said: “The perpetrator has been able for too long to hide behind all of us.”
